WebSphere Memory Leak

[websphere75]

Hi everyone,
I'm getting a memory leak within websphere 3.5.7. The JVM seems to be filling up every 3 to 4 days and then causes the application to crash. The JVM size is set to 256Mb which should be plenty, but perhaps there's a process that's not being shut down, and is constantly spawning (?).
Has anyone come across this before?

 

[gregaglenn]

I am investigating a similar problem. At least part of the problem was related to some exceptions that were occuring frequently in JSPs, and generating a lot of output to the stderr and tracelog files. You might look to see if this is the case with your system. Apparently WebSphere 3.5.6 leaks memory when it has to put a lot of stuff into these logs. Eliminating these errors significantly reduced the frequency of the out-of-memory errors, from every other day to every two weeks. I am currently checking to see if the remainder of the leak is due to other output to the stdout or stderr files.

 

[websphere75]

That's great! I'll have a look into that area of things and see what's going on. We are getting a lot of errors written to the standard out/error and tracefile. If this is what's causing the problem, then I should be able to remedy it quickly. Thanks again, and if you have any other information it would be greatly appreciated.

 

[websphere75]

Also, do you have any tool or utility that you are using at an OS level (vmstat/ps vg) for monitoring memory leaks? We are currently running scripted vmstat and ps vg commands to monitor how well garbage collection is working. It's giving us some useful information but not enough to resolve the problem. Also, how did you come to the conclusion that the log files might be causing or be contributing to the leak?

Thanks again.

 

[jlabrash]

Hi,
We experienced this same problem a few weeks ago on our production system. 256 MB (maximum java heap size) is not enough! We had an initial setting of 384 MB as our maximum setting, however as the application grew we were experiencing more and more OutOfMemory errors showing up in the logs. The solution to our problem was to set the initial java heap size to 256 MB and the maximum to 512 MB. Since this configuration change, no OutOfMemory errors have occurred.

Thanks,
Jon LaBrash
WebSphere Administrator